The invention relates to a deflection roller for guiding and/or deflecting a rubber tire component, in particular a rubber tire component comprising reinforcement cords. The invention further relates to the use of said deflection roller in various tire building machines and the tire building machines comprising said deflection roller.
Known deflection rollers are used in various tire building applications to guide rubber tire components from one point or station to another point or station, for example via an intermediate festooner. The known deflection rollers comprise a solid circumferential surface for contacting and guiding the tire component. An application for said known deflection rollers in the field of tire building is the use of the deflection rollers in a festooner, wherein the distance between the deflection rollers can be varied to increase or decrease the capacity of the festooner. A continuous length of a rubber tire component is fed into the festooner and zigzags between the plurality of deflection rollers before exiting the festooner at a discharge side. At each deflection roller, the tire component contacts a substantial part of the circumferential surface of the deflection roller, resulting in relatively high friction forces between the rubber of the tire component and circumferential surface which can make it hard to correct any misalignment of the tire component with respect to the center of the deflection roller. The tire component can be seriously deformed when it eventually contacts or runs over the side of the deflection roller.
To ensure that the tire component remains centered with respect to the deflection roller, the circumferential surfaces of known deflection rollers are often crowned. The increased circumferential length at top of the crown automatically centers the tire component with respect to the deflection roller. However, the increased circumferential length at the top of the crown has the disadvantage that it causes uneven stretching of the tire component, which in particular for cord reinforced tire components causes permanent waving in the length of the cord reinforced tire component.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a deflection roller, the use of said deflection roller in various tire building machines and tire building machines comprising said deflection roller, wherein the aforementioned drawback of the known deflection roller can be at least partly resolved.